Finding Music in Shakespeare, Suffragists and Mitch McConnell

After the lost were found and the lonely were loved, after the disguises were doffed and the confusions were cleared, after the stanzas and the verses and the boogieing and the bows, Shaina Taub still had one final sentiment to sing.

“Even when it seems all hope is gone,” she warbled as a preview performance of her musical adaptation of “Twelfth Night” came to a close earlier this month at Shakespeare in the Park, “we play on.”

The words were a riff on the play’s opening line, “If music be the food of love, play on.” But they also represented a mission statement of sorts for Ms. Taub, a fiercely political singer-songwriter whose multifarious career in musical theater is taking off even as she rues the state of the nation.

So she writes about guns. She writes about refugees. She borrows lyrics from Mitch McConnell. And when, as she is doing this summer, she adapts a Shakespeare classic about twins who mistakenly believe one another to be lost at sea, she finds in the cross-dressing comedy an opportunity to explore how gender shapes the way we perceive one another, and ourselves. (“I feel so seen as a guy,” says Viola, the female twin dressed as her brother.)

Ms. Taub, who while growing up in rural Vermont was not only memorizing cast albums but also aiding the American Cancer Society (she created a student-run cabaret to benefit the organization) and opposing the Iraq War (she organized protest music at the local movie theater).